Palmer, 47, was lethally injected today for the May 8, 1989, gun slayings of Charles
Sponhaltz and Steven Vargo on a rural Belmont County road. He was the second Ohioan executed this
year.

The small witness room in the prison Death House was crowded. The widows of Palmer’s victims,
Tiffany Nameth and Valerie Vargo Jolliffe, watched his execution, along with two of Sponhaltz’s
daughters, a niece and a friend of Vargo’s.

“I want you to know I’ve carried you in my heart for years now,” Palmer said in his last
statement. “I am so sorry. I wish this could bring him back to you, but it can’t. I only hope you
let the pain and hurt die with me today.”

After the exectution, Tiffany Nameth, widow of Charles Sponhaltz, “I feel today this comes to
an end...I figure his apology should have come a long time ago. When you murder somebody what good
does an apology do?”

Valerie Vargo-Jolliffe, widow of Steven Vargo, said, ”I’m glad this is finally over and
justice is served for my late husband.”

Palmer was unusual among the 48 men who have been executed in Ohio since 1999 because he
acknowledged committing the murders and said he deserved the death penalty for his crimes. He
refused to participate in the gubernatorial clemency process because he said he didn’t deserve
mercy.

“I killed two people. I've always accepted responsibility for the taking of their lives,”
Palmer said in an interview last week. “I believe in justice and I believe that the victims, their
hatred, their anger, they need to have justice.”

Palmer was a passenger in a friend’s Dodge Charger on May 8, 1989, when the vehicle
rear-ended Sponhaltz’s pickup truck, which was stopped in the middle of the road. Palmer admitted
he was drunk and high on drugs and had been firing his gun out the window of the car prior to the
accident.

Without provocation, Palmer shot Sponhaltz twice in the head. Minutes later, Vargo drove by
and pulled over to see if he could help.

“When I turned around, I ran almost dead into him,” Palmer recalled. “He said, ‘What the
hell?’...That's all he got to say and I shot him. I mean that could have been anyone. That could
have been my own mother.”

Palmer offered no explanation.

“I didn't kill him because I thought he was a witness. I killed him because he was there,” he
said. He refers to the murders as his “postal moment.”

Palmer said in the interview that he was “searching for God and I found him in 2007.” He said
he has been forgiven for his sins.

No family members watched Palmer’s execution. His witnesses were two clergy members and a
friend.